In the Beginning

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”

The first chapter of Genesis begins with Yahweh looking down upon earth, which, according to the story, began as a big rock covered in water. (I’m just telling you what the story says.) He takes to separating night from day, creating the continents, the plants, the land animals, the birds, the sea creatures, and so on, until he creates man to rule over what he has made. The first man he creates is Adam, from whom he creates Eve, the first woman. Yahweh lets the two roam free in the Garden of Eden, telling them to eat whichever fruits they want, save the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yahweh goes off for a walk, and the snake convinces Eve to taste the fruit. As soon as she and Adam take bites of the fruit, they become aware of (surprise) good and evil, and realize they are naked, promptly fashioning makeshift clothes to cover themselves. God comes looking for them, and, seeing what they have done, curses the woman with painful childbirth and curses the man with death. Yahweh drives the pair out of the garden and sends cherubim to protect the tree of life, the fruit of which the pair are now forbidden to eat. (Why didn’t they just eat that fruit first?) Thus, humankind became subject to mortality and was corrupted by sin.

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First, to note two things about this story I find particularly interesting that, to me, seem oddly under-addressed:

First (again) –note the discrepancy between the first description of how Yahweh made man and the second description of how Yahweh made man. In Genesis chapter 1, Yahweh creates man and woman at the same time - presumably his plan from the beginning. In Genesis chapter 2, Yahweh creates solely Adam and, finding that Adam has no suitable helper, then creates one – Eve - upon Adam’s request. Why do the two stories not coincide? Why would the author describe the same event in two completely different ways between two chapters?

Midrashic literature has explained this discrepancy through the character of Lilith. The demon Lilith originally appeared in Babylonian mythology and was adapted in later Jewish folk writings to explain why the two biblical accounts don’t seem to match up. Lilith was supposedly Adam’s first wife, who refused to be subservient to him and chose instead to flee to the Red Sea and live independently, creating hundreds of demons for herself a day. She took to the business of strangling infant children in their sleep and copulating with men in dreams to produce more demon offspring. As an apology for giving him an unruly wife, Yahweh created for Adam the docile Eve as a back-up plan. This story, however, was edited out of canon – possibly because the headstrong female character of Lilith was perceived a threat to the male-centric religion. Thus, a gap was left, and we inherited the contradictory story.

Second,  note how Yahweh repeatedly says that man is “like us.” Who is included in this mysterious group? Some Christians interpret this as meaning the Trinity, but this interpretation does not make sense – first, if Yahweh is considered as being “one,” he would not refer to himself in the plural tense; second, the concept of a “trinity” did not exist at the time of writing. The real members of this group are the other characters in the ancient Jewish pantheon. The Hebrews were not always solely monotheistic – they too began with a pantheon,  just like the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies they borrowed from. Yahweh was only one of many gods. Yet over time, Yahweh, the war god, came to be revered by some as supreme over the other gods – the Zeus of the Hebrew pantheon. This cult of Yahweh expanded until Yahweh became the voice of the gods, more powerful than the rest and dominant over them, as he is in the Genesis account. With time, Yahweh the war god would become the only god. Thus, Hebrew monotheism was birthed.

I write so much about this topic because it fascinates me. I grew up in a conservative Christian family, and I was taught to take the Genesis account as actual history. For many years, I did, unquestionably. I became offended by whomever dared to claim it was just another culture’s creation myth and not an actual historical record. But as I grew older and allowed myself to question, I found fewer and fewer reasons to take the story literally. I no longer had any reason to believe the account was special from any other Middle-Eastern mythology’s account of how the world was created. Today I study Genesis purely out of fascination for the evolution of modern religion. How amazing it is that from Sumerian and Akkadian myths this story was created, and from this story all Abrahamic religions have sprung. It is truly incredible to see how the beliefs of billions of people today have metamorphosed from the very earliest religious beliefs of humankind – from the mythologies of Sumer and Ur and the early peoples of Mesopotamia, the land between rivers.